The Song Bon Scott Never Got to Sing Live Again: AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” at River Plate, December 2009
On December 4, 2009, in front of 60,000 Argentinians packed into Buenos Aires’s River Plate Stadium, AC/DC reached the moment in their show that every fan in the audience had been waiting for. The lights came up. Angus Young’s red schoolboy uniform caught the spotlight. The opening chord of “Highway to Hell” rang out across the stadium. And then 60,000 voices — louder than the band, louder than the speakers, loud enough to make the cameras pick up nothing but crowd noise for entire stretches of the song — sang every word back at them.
What was captured on film that night is widely considered one of the greatest live performances of “Highway to Hell” ever recorded. It is also, for anyone who knows the history of the song, one of the most emotionally complicated.
To understand why “Highway to Hell” hits the way it does in the Live at River Plate film, you have to understand who wrote it, who sang it, and what happened to him six months after the song was released.
“Highway to Hell” was the title track of AC/DC’s sixth studio album, released on July 27, 1979. It was the band’s commercial breakthrough — the album that took them from cult Australian hard rock heroes to global stadium contenders. The lyrics were written by Bon Scott, the band’s frontman, and they were autobiographical. Scott was talking about the relentless touring life, the road that never ended, the highway that he could see no way off of. “No stop signs. Speed limit. Nobody’s gonna slow me down.” It was a song about being unable to escape what you had built.
On February 19, 1980 — just under seven months after Highway to Hell was released — Bon Scott was found dead in the back seat of a friend’s car in London. He had spent the previous night drinking. He was 33 years old. The cause of death, ruled by the coroner, was acute alcohol poisoning. The man who had written and sung “Highway to Hell” had, in the most literal possible reading of his own lyrics, never made it off the highway.
Most bands do not survive the death of a frontman who is that central to their identity. AC/DC did. They hired Brian Johnson, recorded Back in Black within months, and came back stronger than they had ever been. But “Highway to Hell” remained — a song that the band kept playing, every tour, every show, in stadiums all over the world. Brian Johnson sang it. He had been singing it for nearly thirty years by the time AC/DC arrived in Buenos Aires in December 2009. Every time he walked to the front of the stage and led the crowd through the chorus, he was singing words that another man had written about a fate that had caught up with him.
Argentinian crowds are famous in the global rock and metal community for an intensity that bands consistently describe as unlike anywhere else on Earth. Concerts in Buenos Aires are not just events — they are something closer to religious gatherings, with entire stadiums treating songs as collective rituals rather than performances to watch. AC/DC had played in Argentina before. They knew what was coming. And by the time they arrived for three nights at the River Plate Stadium in December 2009, on the back of the global success of Black Ice, the band and their director David Mallet had decided this was where they would film their next live release.
Thirty-two HD cameras were rigged across the stadium. Every angle of the stage was covered. Crane shots, dolly tracks, handheld rigs above the crowd. When “Highway to Hell” arrived in the setlist on the second of the three filmed nights, every camera was rolling.
The footage that resulted is hard to describe to anyone who has not seen it. As the opening chord hits and Brian Johnson walks toward the microphone, the entire River Plate Stadium begins to shake. Not metaphorically — the upper decks of the stadium can be seen physically bouncing in the wide shots, tens of thousands of fans jumping in unison hard enough to register as motion on camera. By the time the chorus arrives, the audio engineers are no longer capturing a band leading a singalong. They are capturing 60,000 Argentinians singing a song so loudly that the band’s instruments and Brian Johnson’s vocals become almost secondary.
Watch the close-ups of Angus Young during that performance. He is grinning the kind of grin that a man only allows himself when something is happening on stage that even he, with thirty-five years of stadium concerts behind him, has not seen before. Watch Cliff Williams on bass. Watch Phil Rudd at the drums. Watch Brian Johnson step back from the microphone for entire bars and just let the crowd carry the song. They know what they are witnessing. They are letting it happen.
What makes the performance so emotionally heavy, for those who know the history, is the unspoken context. Bon Scott had written this song about being trapped on a road he could see no way off of. He had died on that road, six months after singing those words for the first time. Thirty years later, in a stadium on the other side of the world from where he had grown up in Australia, 60,000 fans who had never seen him alive were singing his words back at the band that had carried them since his death. The song that had been about death had become, in the hands of generations of fans who had inherited it, an anthem of unbroken life.
Brian Johnson has said in interviews over the years that he is acutely aware, every time he sings “Highway to Hell,” that he is singing another man’s autobiographical statement. He has said that he tries to honor it without imitating it. He has said that the responsibility of being the man who sings Bon Scott’s most famous song, every night, for nearly four decades, is not something he ever stops thinking about.
When Live at River Plate was released in May 2011 — premiering at the Hammersmith Apollo in London on May 6, then on DVD and Blu-ray worldwide — the “Highway to Hell” performance from those Buenos Aires nights became one of its most circulated clips. It went viral on YouTube within days of release and has since accumulated tens of millions of views. Music journalists have repeatedly cited it as one of the great moments in concert film history. The Argentinian crowd’s chant during the performance — the seismic, stadium-wide chorus that almost drowns the band out — has been used in documentaries, tribute videos, and countless retrospectives about both AC/DC and the global power of live rock and roll.
There is a deeper layer to the recording that only became visible years after the fact. The Buenos Aires shows in 2009 turned out to be the last great live document of Malcolm Young at full power. The rhythm guitarist — the quiet brother, the songwriter who had co-written “Highway to Hell” alongside Bon Scott and Angus Young in 1979 — would step away from the band in April 2014 with dementia, and would die on November 18, 2017, at the age of 64. Watching him on stage in Live at River Plate, playing the rhythm part on a song he had helped write thirty years earlier, with Bon Scott already three decades gone and his own diagnosis still unknown to the world, gives the performance a weight that no one in the stadium that night could have anticipated.
Three of the four people responsible for “Highway to Hell” are now gone. Bon Scott in 1980. Malcolm Young in 2017. Producer Robert “Mutt” Lange’s collaboration with the band ended after the album. Only Angus Young and Brian Johnson remain.
But the recording from December 2009 captured something that does not need any of them to be present anymore. It captured 60,000 Argentinians singing a 30-year-old song so loudly that the band became the audience. It captured the moment a song about being trapped on a highway became a song about millions of strangers, on every continent on Earth, refusing to let the man who wrote it disappear.
Bon Scott never made it off the highway. But every time Live at River Plate plays that performance back, his voice is being carried by a stadium full of people who would not exist as fans of his music if he had.
Sometimes a song outlives the man who wrote it not because of what he said, but because of who keeps singing it.
